Jacobins
- This term refers to the French club of the Jacobins, which should not be confused with the Scottish Jacobites. It is not related either to the term mathematician Jacobin.
The Jacobins (French: jacobins) were members of the political group of the French Revolution called the Club des Jacobins, whose headquarters were in Paris, in the convent of the Dominican friars (popularly known as Jacobin friars) on Rue Saint-Honoré.
They were republicans, defenders of popular sovereignty, therefore they advocated universal suffrage; their vision of the indivisibility of the nation led them to defend a strong and centralized state. They are often confused with The Terror, partly due to the black legend that spread the Thermidorian reaction to Robespierre. In the 19th century, Jacobinism was the source of inspiration for the republican parties that promoted the French Second and Third Republics. In contemporary France, this term was associated with a centralist conception of the Republic.[citation needed]
Onomastics
In France, since the Middle Ages, Dominicans (dominicains) were colloquially called "Jacobins" (jacobins), after the convent of the order founded in Paris early 13th century and dedicated to Saint James (French: Saint Jacques and in Latin: Iacobus), a convent that later gave its name to the street where it stood, Rue Saint-Jacques, in the Latin Quarter. When the Breton Club it moved its meeting place to the Dominican convent on rue Saint-Honoré, founded in the 17th century and located a stone's throw from the 'Hall of the Manège', where the Constituent Assembly held its sessions, ironically gave them the nickname "Jacobins", or "Jacobins' club", a name they ended up officially adopting.
History of the Jacobin Club
Principles
In April-May 1789, a group of representatives of the Third Estate in the assembly of the Estates General of 1789 began to meet in what would be known as the «Club Breton», a forum for debate and reflection on the Complaints Notebooks (Cahiers de Doléances), and the preparation of the debates in the assembly. Its name comes from the fact that the first members of the club were deputies from the province of Brittany, gathered around Isaac Le Chapelier and Jean-Denis Lanjuinais. They were soon joined by members of the clergy and deputies from other regions such as Mirabeau, the Duke of Aiguillon, Sieyès, Pétion, Volney, Robespierre, Charles and Alexandre de Lameth, etc. Once the Constituent Assembly was constituted, they changed their name to that of the Société des Amis de la Constitution (Society of Friends of the Constitution) and settled in October of the same year in the Convent of the Jacobins, a former Dominican convent located on Rue Saint-Germain. Honore of Paris. From then on, they were called Jacobins by their political opponents, initially to ridicule them. In 1789, they brought together 200 deputies of various tendencies, and their first president was the Breton deputy Isaac Le Chapelier. At that time, Mirabeau was among its members.
A center for the creation of ideas and the intellectual engine of the actions undertaken by the Revolution, its influence had a national reach thanks to similar societies scattered throughout France. The network created by these numerous groups gave him enormous political power. If in August 1791 there were 152 affiliated provincial societies, in 1792 there were 2,000.
Schism
Until 1791, the club, like the majority of the citizenry, was in favor of the establishment of a constitutional monarchy. But the escape attempt of Louis XVI, arrested in Varennes in June 1791, dashed many hopes of trusting in a monarchical system of government. That event divided the Jacobins into two opposing currents. Some, led by Robespierre, advocated the deposition of the king, and the establishment of the republic. The others, followers of Antoine Barnave and Jacques Pierre Brissot, thought that, given the threat of war with foreign monarchies, it was preferable to stop the Revolution and achieve a compromise with the elites of the Old Regime to maintain the constitutional monarchy. The latter ended up leaving the Club des Jacobins to found the Club des Feuillants, but the split did not stop the expansion of the Society. On January 15, 1793, after the trial of Louis XVI had concluded, the Jacobins had a decisive influence on the vote in favor of the king's death at the National Convention.
Way of Power
The republican ideal of the Jacobins would take hold from that moment on. In September 1792, the Club changed its name to Société des Jacobins amis de la liberté et de l'égalité (Society of the Jacobins Friends of Liberty and Equality). Until then made up exclusively of left-wing bourgeois intellectuals, it decided to open its ranks to the popular classes that, apart from serving as tactical support, constituted the foundation of its ideology. Robespierre, supported by Georges Danton, Jean-Paul Marat, Camille Desmoulins and Louis de Saint-Just, took the reins of the movement that launched a policy of opposition to the Girondins, a majority at the National Convention, many of them former Jacobins. The Gironde falls in June 1793, under the violent action of the Hébertists or "Exaggerated", the extremist wing of the Montagnard, and leaves the way free for the Jacobins within the Convention. Jacobin power extends to the "committees", executive bodies of the mountain revolutionary government (a good part of the mountain deputies and rulers were Jacobins). The members of the Committee of Public Safety and the Committee of General Safety were mostly Jacobins in 1793.
The Mountain Convention and the Terror
The Jacobin Highlanders ruled from June 1793 to July 1794, imposed the Reign of Terror and used their power in the Committee of Public Safety to suppress all opposition to the government with unrelenting violence. The Terror was initially established to safeguard the Republic threatened by the counterrevolutionary civil war, and by the war that foreign monarchies maintained on the country's borders. Although there was relative unanimity among the Jacobins in their principles, their divergences became more acute from the second half of 1793.
On the one hand, the Hébertists—a heterogeneous and only partly Jacobin movement—attempted to radicalize the National Convention, and controlled the Commune, the local government of Paris. Finding themselves overwhelmed by their left, Robespierre and Saint-Just obtained from the revolutionary court the arrest and execution of his most visible head, Jacques-René Hébert, as well as some of his followers, in March 1794.
At the same time Danton, who had declared war on England and the Netherlands in February 1793 and had then demanded the annexation of Belgium, had evolved towards negotiating positions with the enemy and with the French aristocracy, to achieve peace and stop the war. For this reason, his followers were called "indulgent." When at the beginning of 1794 he also tried to stop the spillovers of the terrorist repression, the Hébertist-leaning leaders of the Committee of Public Safety arrested him and executed him together with Camille Desmoulins, without Robespierre being able to prevent it.
Once the Dantonists were eliminated in March-April 1794, the dictatorship of the committees intensified, beginning what is usually called the "Great Terror." Although Robespierre continued to defend the need for Terror in the Convention, he increasingly appeared as a moderate unable to stop the criminal drift of the committees led by Collot d'Herbois, Barère de Vieuzac and Billaud-Varenne.
Even so, in June 1794 Robespierre succeeded in expelling from the club Joseph Fouche, then still a radical atheist, who in April had been elected, to Robespierre's scandal, President of the Jacobins; the ensuing political vendetta against Fouche, whom he detested both privately—he had refused his sister's hand—and publicly—he held him responsible for the Lyon massacres—led to the conspiracy that would open the way for reaction thermidorian Isolated within the government, Robespierre's denunciation of the excesses and corruption of the Terror from the rostrum of the Convention will come late. The members of the General Security Committee, feeling threatened, allied themselves with the moderate deputies of the Swamp, promising them the end of the Terror, and prepared the fall of Robespierre.
End of the Jacobin Club
Malapeau etching based on a Duplessis-Bertaux waterproof.
The rule of the Jacobins ends with the arrest of Saint-Just and Robespierre, on 9 Thermidor (July 27, 1794). The next day, they are guillotined along with 20 followers. It is estimated that in the following days, some 80 Jacobin deputies are executed. On November 13, 1794, the Convention declared the Jacobin Club illegal and closed it down. It reopens shortly after, once the main suspects of "robespierrismo" have been eliminated. The revenge reaction both of the victims of the Terror and of the opposition sectors of Jacobinism then preys on anyone who appears to be a Jacobin: it is the so-called “White Terror”. After the attempts at the Jacobin revival of Germinal and Prairial in Year III (April and May 1795), the Club was definitively closed by order of Joseph Fouché, Minister of Police, and former member of the Government of Terror. After the closure, the active Jacobins reorganized through new clubs, such as the Pantheon Club or the Riding Hall Club, from which they led the opposition to the Directory until the Napoleonic coup d'état.
Jacobinism in the Revolution
Political Theory
The democracy advocated by the Jacobins was a direct heir to the democracy model of Jean Jacques Rousseau, in its communitarian aspect and creator of the concept of citizen. Of Rousseau's theories set forth in The Social Contract, they share the idea that sovereignty resides in the people and not in a leader or a governing body. They also share the notion of general will, which is not the sum of individual wills but rather comes from the common interest. This primacy of the common good over particular interests led some analysts, such as the historian Jules Michelet, to reproach Rousseau and later the Jacobins for having favored the appearance of totalitarian regimes.
The Rousseauian objection to the representative system was not, however, shared in its entirety by the Jacobins, who, despite mistrusting said system (not only in its liberal-bourgeois census aspect, which linked political rights and the vote to own property, but also in its democratic aspect), they considered it an essential lesser evil, given the technical impossibility of the nation as a whole expressing its will directly.
In accordance with these concepts, Jacobinism developed its own model of political representation. According to him, the parliamentarians had to be constantly monitored and coerced by popular power (Jacobin-style organizations such as clubs, societies or the popular armed forces) to avoid deviations in a direction contrary to the revolution. Thus, the power of parliament was opposed by popular power, the power of the street, which in practice led to the emergence of a double power: one emanating from parliament, which was the repository of national sovereignty, and another of a physical nature. and coercive embodied by the activists of the extremist wing of the Jacobin groups. This dichotomy led to a certain contradiction between the concept of political representation and street activism, embodied by the Sans culottes, since certain activists who represented a part of the population could subjugate the popular will through coercion.
For the Jacobins, the State is the defender of the common good. Therefore, obedience to the Constitution and the laws is essential. From there is born a high degree of patriotism and the exaltation of the nation conceived as an indivisible unit. At this point, they opposed the Girondins and tended to centralize the organization of the country for its defense. The cult of the Homeland is confused with the cult of freedom, which must be defended if it is attacked. "The French Republic does not deal with the enemy over its territory" was a famous Jacobinist slogan.
It was about putting into practice the principles enumerated in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen synthesized in the motto Liberty-Equality (the concept of Fraternity appeared in 1848). To do this, they broaden the role of the citizen, encouraging them to participate actively in political life. In 1789, they proclaim civil liberties, freedom of the press and freedom of conscience. Censorship is abolished in 1791. For the first time in the history of France, they adopt universal suffrage (although it was only male) for the elections to the National Convention in September 1792.
So that citizens can be free and equal, they defend the value of the republican public school, and in 1793 they establish the compulsory nature of primary education. In 1794, they voted to abolish slavery.
The difficult Jacobin practice
The Jacobins were always in the political vanguard of the Revolution from 1789 and governed from 1792 to 1794. From 1793, the pressure of events meant that a good part of their actions came into contradiction with their doctrine. Being eminently pragmatic, it evolved depending on the current situation until it was distorted by the dictatorial action of a handful of men.
The Jacobins respected private property and worked so that the popular classes could have access to it. At the same time, they condemned the large traditional landowners, such as the nobility and the Church, the main exponents of the seigneurial regime of the Old Regime. However, they will not achieve the desired distribution of national assets.
They defended free trade, but the hardships that had been dragging on since the last years of the Old Regime and the state of war led them to increase taxation and impose economic dirigisme. They also reinforced the centralism already existing under the monarchy, through government representatives in the departments, considering the Parisian dictatorship necessary, both economically and politically, to save the nation. These apparent contradictions contributed in part to the downfall of the Jacobins.
With their policy of opposition of popular power to the representative system, the Jacobins ended up with 60 Girondin deputies of the Assembly. The hostilities against said system made it stagger to the point of entering into crisis. Jacobin techniques of coercion and liquidation of the opposition led certain moderate voters of the Convention to inhibit themselves from voting.
Some historians credit the Jacobins with the merit of having laid the foundations of republicanism, that for the first time it was the State that took charge of social action and that the country emerged victorious from the wars on its borders. On the other hand, they consider that they were indeed radical when compared to the Girondins, and moderate compared to the Hébertists and the enragés (angry).
Other authors ignore the Jacobin legacy and only take into account his inquisitorial practices and his purification methods for anyone who strayed from orthodoxy, thus limiting Jacobinism to the period of the Terror.
The Jacobin ideology according to its detractors
Jacobinism is an ideology developed and implemented during the French Revolution of 1789. In the words of F. Furet, in Penser la révolution française (quoted by Hoel in Introduction au jacobinisme...) “ Jacobinism is both an ideology and a power: a system of representations and a system of action. This ideology presents, according to Hoel, in L'idéologie jacobine, the following 5 characteristics: 1. Omnipotence of the State; 2. Despotism of Paris; 3. Colonialism; 4. Cultural genocide; 5. Rejection of the Social Contract (Rousseau) and federalism;
Jacobinism from the XIX to the XX
This confrontation is evident throughout the French XIX century, in which fear of dictatorship predominates Jacobin and the "reds" not only by the monarchist and conservative leaders, but also by the liberal representatives of the bourgeoisie such as François Guizot and Adolphe Thiers.
For republicans of the 19th century, the Jacobin heritage associated with the heritage of the French Revolution is still very much alive. The book The Conjuration of Equals, written in 1828 by Filippo Buonarroti, a friend of Gracchus Babeuf, will have a great resonance among republicans such as François Vincent Raspail, Auguste Blanqui and Louis Blanc. Jacobinism is present in the revolution of 1830, in the second republic of 1848 and in the Paris Commune of 1871.
In the Constituent Assembly of 1848, the heated debates between Alexis de Tocqueville, who limited himself to the inheritance of 1789, and Alexandre Ledru-Rollin, who similarly defended Jacobinism of 1793, reflected an opposition that was to remain valid until the XX century. On January 29, 1891, Georges Clemenceau incorporated Jacobinism into the ideological heritage of the Third Republic by declaring in a speech in the National Assembly that "The (French) Revolution is a bloc from which nothing can be subtracted." Politicians of the 20th century such as Jean Jaurès, Pierre Mendès-France and more recently the socialist Jean-Pierre Chevènement have vindicated the defense of Jacobin ideals.
Jacobinism outside France
In the 19th century, movements were created that adopted the adjective "Jacobins" in many European countries to demand political freedom and conscience, the end of the domination of the aristocracy and the elaboration of a constitution based on the sovereignty of the people.
- In Germany: The Republic of Maguncia
- In Poland: The patriotic movements led by writer and politician Hugo Kollataj from 1790 to 1812.
- In the United Kingdom: The London Corresponding Societyfounded in 1792 by activist John Thelwall to reform the Parliament and extend the right to vote to the working class.
- In Italy: The revolutionary unification movements led by Giuseppe Mazzini and Cavour, as well as the Carbonaries.
In America, Jacobin-influenced groups were formed in the United States, Haiti, Santo Domingo and Brazil. In the Río de la Plata, Argentina, the ideas of the most radical revolutionaries of the May 1810 movement were Jacobin-inspired, just like the 1851 Revolution in Chile. The socialist magazine Jacobin, founded in 2010, with North American parentage and also present in other countries, claims the revolutionary heritage of the black Jacobins (black jacobins) Haitians.
In the 20th century, the leaders of the 1917 Russian Revolution and Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, founder of the Republic of Turkey, were openly inspired by the Jacobin doctrine. The Uruguayan current of the early XX century, led by José Batlle y Ordóñez, of a republican nature, also vindicated Jacobinism.
In Spain, the political association El Jacobino proposes a program inspired by the legacy and tradition of the Republican and Jacobin left.
Other prominent members during the French Revolution
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